Apple may be testing an M3 Mac Mini

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, in his Power On newsletter, said that the company is testing a new Mac on its campus and he assumed that it is Mac Mini. As per sources from Gurman, the Mac in question features 8 CPU cores, where four are efficiency cores & four are performance cores. Besides, along with ten GPU cores, it has 24GB of memory. As the release of the M2 Mac mini was done in January, the new model is expected to be the quickest refresh for an Apple silicon Mac.

Release and availability:

It runs macOS Sonoma 14.1, which is the first "point update" for the OS that is unreleased yet. macOS Sonoma version 14 is expected to be released in September or early October. At the same time, the 14.1 version is expected to be available in October or November with new M3 Macs.

What does Gurman think about this?

Gurman has also confirmed that along with the new system, there are five Macs in testing, and these are as follows: 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, iMac, and now the Mac mini. Additionally, two MacBook Pros are there, including a 14-inch model with an M3 Pro & a 16-inch model with M3 Max.

We still don't know if the M3 is going to be a 3nm chip or still a 5nm chip like the M2. However, we believe it will be a 3nm chip, which is still a new process. The whole supply is required for the iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 chip. A new report from The Information elaborated on the way Apple deals with TSMC, the company is paying for only working chips from the new process. It causes TSMC to absorb the price of failed chips. Companies mostly purchase entire silicon wafers and want to get working chips as much as possible. We still don't know what Apple pays for the chips or for taking TSMC’s initial 3nm production.

Regarding when the debut of Mac will be done, he thinks it will not come until next year. Based on the company's last earnings call, Gurman says that according to the suggestion of Apple, a double-digit percentage decline can be seen in its Mac revenue in the 4th quarter. According to Apple's suggestion, it is not going to launch any new models until next year.

Other expected lineup:

Depending on what is in the testing at Apple, these are the expected lineup:

• M3 13-inch MacBook Air (codenamed Mac 15,1 and J513/J613)

• M3 15-inch MacBook Air (codenamed Mac 15,2 and J515/J615)

• M3 13-inch MacBook Pro (codenamed Mac 15,3 and J504)

• M3 iMac (codenamed Mac 15,4, Mac 15,5, J433 and J434)

• M3 Pro and M3 Max 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros (codenamed Mac 15,7, Mac 15,8, J514 and J516)

• Possible M3 Mac mini (codenamed Mac 15,12)

Gurman said earlier this year that new M3 computers might drop in this year's second half. Therefore, the expected 2024 release date is a change from the prediction. According to Gurman, the company is testing a computer now at its campus under model identifier Mac 15,12 and he assumed that it's Mac Mini.

The specs mentioned above in this article about Mac Mini are similar to the base model M2 Mac Mini, except the installed memory. Entry-level Apple silicon Macs come with 8GB RAM at least. If Apple jumps to 24GB for the base model, it could surprise users a lot.

Gurman's thinking towards M3-powered Macs:

According to Gurman, there will not be any M3-powered Macs available before the 1st fiscal quarter of 2024, beginning in October. It can bring all the expected M3 Macs up to six as well, as it can cover primary desktops & laptops of the company including iMac. But Gurman doesn't expect M3 versions of the Mac Studio and Mac Pro which jumped to Apple’s M2 silicon at WWDC this year.

He also discussed the launch of the iPhone 15. According to him, the new mobile is expected to be announced either Sept. 12 or 13. It indicates that only a few weeks you have to wait until the reveal of the mobile is done. Although Gurman expects the debut of the first M3-powered Macs will be done as early as October, he never expects the Mac mini to be one of the first models that will come with the M3 chip. These will probably be: the 13-inch MacBook Pro, 13-inch MacBook Air, and 24-inch iMac.

Last month, he said that a new Mac mini wasn't expected to emerge until late 2024 at the earliest. Developer logs indicate that Apple is testing an M3 Mac mini. It indicates that we can see it sooner than expected. The latest Mac mini models are less than a year old as these were introduced in January 2023. The ‌M3‌ chip could be fabricated using TSMC's 3nm procedure to get the best performance & power efficiency improvements to the 5nm-based ‌M2‌ chip in existing devices.

What Could a M3 Mac Mini Offer Editors?

It would bring the total number of expected Macs up to six off the bat. This one is going to be the best Mac available in the market. Mac Mini, which was introduced in 2023, comes with the Apple M2 Chip or the Apple M2 Pro. This Pro version provides a 10-core CPU with 6 performance cores & 4 efficiency cores, and comes with 16-core GPUs.

Video editors use media engines that are powered by hardware-accelerated H.264, HEVC, ProRes, and ProRes RAW. It can show quality speeds and maintain the speed level in an excellent way when you compare this to other options. Like other Mac releases, these features and new specs grabbed the attention of the people.

Conclusion:

If you are satisfied using your Mac or other PC setups for the video workflows, you should check this news to know how it changes specs and the overall price. But the judgement on whether it will be able to give a tough competition to other models or not—will be reserved until this M3 Mac Mini is available in the market in 2024.